Brazzaville Beach

Not Brazzaville Beach

It's getting on two years since we had a holiday, and *that* was a snatched week on the Kent coast (above), where we took our laptops and spent a goodly portion of each day looking for cafes with wifi so we could keep up with our lives.

We did do some good walking, and drank some good beer in some good pubs, had a sandwich in Sandwich, and I re-read The Crimson Petal and the White... so it was a break, but mainly of the relative-calm-before-the-enormous-storm kind. It was the week we put our house on the market, and nothing has been the same since.

We used to be quite good at holidays, but they take time, planning and cash. All of the above disappeared into the vortex of our decision to join Lancaster Cohousing... a weekend of meetings every month, with train fares and finding places to stay, selling a house, moving to the Interim Bungalow, project commitments, trying to spend more time up north and less time down south, failing, trying to manage two lives ... it's not very sustainable, and it's completely exhausting.

When I look back I wonder if we should have made the break sooner, but then we had our own place in Oxford, and good friends all around, and we knew how everything worked. We didn't have much fun in our temporary northern accommodation, and anyway you don't leave Oxford lightly, not if you've loved it longtime. But then I also wonder if we should have taken it more gradually, moved in slowly, instead of basically camping in a house full of boxes with no internet, no washing machine, no transport, in the middle of a building site with a postcode that didn't really exist. In the end, we felt that would have just prolonged all the above agonies. We were absolutely in accord that we should just get on with it, so we did. But shit, it was hard. We were very tired.

And we still are. There hasn't been any respite... if anything the reverse. I've had more work travel this year than ever before -- I'm not proud of this, carbon footprint-wise, and it's probably a one-off, but in the last 12 months I've hauled my arse to Boston, New York (same trip, and I did get the train between them...), the Netherlands, Cambodia, the Netherlands again, and Tanzania. I also go to Oxford every six weeks or so to catch up with people in the NGO X mothership, and to Lytham every week - to spend time with my mum while I still can, and to give my dad, who is too sensible to drink alone, a reason to open a decent bottle of red and take a little time out from the main event. 

We live in a peaceful, calm, warm, comfortable house which I do not regret for a moment moving to, which has felt like home since the moment we stepped through the door, and which has a view of the mighty River Lune which I could look at forever. I knew the first time I stood on the footpath near what became my house that this was the place I wanted to live for the next part of my life. But unlike the house, many aspects of living here are not yet peaceful, calm, warm or comfortable, and some may never be. If I had what I have come to think of as my usual resources, which have seen me through life pretty well so far, I think I'd be relishing some of the challenges that living in an intentional community can bring. I know how to represent myself, and I know it's not all about me. 

But I don't have my usual resources, they have disappeared into a swirling vortex of lost certainties. I'm pretty sure I still know who I am, but quite a lot else is All New Here. My head is so full it might burst. And it's a long, long time since I had one of those weeks where you can't remember what day it is and all you have to think about is which book to read next and whether it's too early for lunch. 

Enter Brazzaville Beach, which M borrowed from the library. It lay on the top of the book heap in the bedroom for the couple of months it took him to get around to reading it, and I have become a little fixated with it. Not the novel, but the place. And not even really the place, as the place in the book is a fictional beach which is nowhere near the real Brazzaville. The real Brazzaville does have a part of it called Brazzaville Beach, but that's not really a beach. 

But none of that is really the point. The point is that Brazzaville Beach is a place that's as far away as it's possible to get. They do things differently there. It will be hot, and the food will be strange. There will be mosquitoes and poor sanitation. You will keep your wallet, which will be full of brightly coloured notes with elephants on them, which you need thousands of to buy a beer, zipped into your trousers-with-many-pockets. You will feel like the whitest person in the world, and you will seek out breezy seafront places to drink that beer, which will come in large, slightly wonky brown bottles. The sun will drop out of the sky like a stone at six in the evening, leaving a jet black sky covered in unfamiliar stars. You will sleep with the noise of calls to prayer and barking dogs competing with the air conditioning, which will go off with the electricity several times a night. 

It will all be a bit scary at first, but you will gradually work out how to read situations, and make friends with taxi drivers and waiters, who will find out what you like to eat and where you want to go, and tell you about their families. If you stay long enough, you'll rent a house and start buying food at the market and sending your washing to the laundry. But you'll never belong there. You'll always be insulated from how life really is, and there will be a space around you that will stay empty, that you can use to think about which book to read next and whether it's too early for lunch. And the rest of the world just gets further and further away. 

That is the space I want, and the more different everything else is, the easier it is to find. I have no actual great desire to go to the Republic of the Congo, but I have a feeling that a week in Devon just wouldn't cut it right now. There's no imminent likelihood even of that, to be honest, so we battle on, relying on the odd yoga class and the odd bottle of single malt to provide their different forms of respite. I haven't read the book myself yet -- novels remain a form of escape, as they always have, but somehow I want to keep this one till I really am on Brazzaville Beach, wherever that turns out to be. 

joella

Summer: nowhere near infinite

Like lots of other people, I started the summer with the intention of finishing Infinite Jest by the end of it. It's not going to happen... I am only 400 pages in.

I read like a fiend, but IJ is just so *dense*. I have had to keep taking a break. Interleaved with it over the last couple of months have been the following, all of which are a walk in the park by contrast and which I thoroughly recommend:

• Consider the Lobster. Also by David Foster Wallace, but essays rather than a novel. I learnt things about the porn industry from its opener, Big Red Son (originally published as 'Neither Adult Nor Entertainment'), that I really wish I didn't know, so I might counsel against that particular chapter if you are sensitive that way. But the title chapter, plus the ones on 9/11, Tracy Austin and John McCain, are total blinding genius. 
• Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. I have a weakness for crime novels but I see it *as* a weakness because such books generally deal with crime and violence without doing much (in fact usually doing precisely nothing) to analyse the power structures underlying them. Larsson totally rocks on that front. Both adult and entertainment. 
• John Le Carre's latest. I managed my first under-140-character book review on this: Slightly heartbroken at the end of A Most Wanted Man. It seems love will not save the world after all. Not much to add to that, except it's beautifully written and plays you like a pro. 
• I think there have been a couple of others, but I forget them now. 

I am still committed to finishing IJ, mind. I'll get there, I estimate, by the end of October. We all need something to help us through the long nights, and immersion in bleak toxic dystopia could be just the thing.

joella

Happy Easter! Or something.

Can I say something difficult on my blog? I ask myself. Yes, I tell myself. Like the man on The Road always says to his son when he wants to do something that might bring him a sliver of relief in a hopeless world, of course you can. Of course you can.

(An aside: the only criticism I have of The Road is that it would have been better if the man had had a daughter, as then there would have been less chance of personal pronoun confusion. I guess this is a novel that would work better in Finnish, where, I gather, they have a case for everything. Though I can't imagine the Finns letting the world get to that state.)

So. I didn't get up this morning. I lay in bed all morning: it was chilly, I had a good book to finish (not The Road, I finished that on Thursday, another good book), and I never get up in the morning if I don't have to.

I got up early this afternoon, planning to make coffee plus cheese-and-mushroom-and-tomato on toast. Mmm. I padded downstairs in pyjamas and a big jumper, thinking that I might never want to get up, but life's not so bad really.

Then I found that the dishwasher has broken again. That's the third time in six months (though it's something different this time: this time it hasn't drained -- the pump's packed up probably -- leaving 2-3 inches of cold, greasy water in the bottom). Housemate C had missed this when she emptied and re-filled it.

Easy to miss, I guess, when it's not your dishwasher (and I am not having a go at housemate C here). But I don't miss these things. And I feel it's my responsibility to sort them out. I should not be overwhelmed by a packed up dishwasher. We have a sink, we have hot water. Nothing is fundamentally threatened.

But it was, somehow, overwhelming. I hauled everything out of the dishwasher, and washed it all up badly. M shouted down that he was trying to have a shower (the shower only works when there is no other water running -- another entirely surmountable obstacle but one which gets to me far more than it should). I shouted back. By the time he came down to make breakfast (and it was totally my turn, and it was way past breakfast time), I was sitting in my red bucket chair, my arms curled round my knees, fat tears rolling down my cheeks.

I don't understand, I said, why the world can't work better. And it upsets me so much that it doesn't. How do you know what to buy? How do you know who to trust?

I'm sorry, said M. I can't do much about it, but do you want to go out for lunch?

I did. We did. We went to Shiraz -- a known quantity in a scary world. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Much later, I rang my mum. We had a long chat about, among other things, dishwashers, weddings, madness, the weather, and the power of novels. Oh, and my dad's earache. She poked him awake to talk to me. I tried a variant of his own joke on him (How many ears does Mr Spock have? Three: his left ear, his right ear and his final frontier) but quickly retreated. And before long I was back on the dishwasher-as-life metaphor.

Looks like you bought the wrong dishwasher, he said.

Dad, I said, it's a Bosch!

Well, said my Jewish, avowedly apolitical, always-knowingly-understated father, I'm not sure you want to trust the Germans, dear.

The older I get, the more I get the point of literature.

joella

Hibernation

I've been all a bit Outdoor Socialising Girl the last week or so. It's been fun, but I have a sore knee, a sore back, a sore hand and all round a bit of a sore head. So in an effort to redress the balance, I spent today doing nothing more energetic than assembling a lawnmower. Mostly I was significantly less energetic than that. I am delighted to report that Mistress Masham's Repose is just as wonderful a book as it was when I first read it about 28 years ago. I don't think I managed it all in one day that time though.

joella

Where the hills have names

Wind, hair, sticks
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

The week in numbers:

Walks: 4
Bike rides: 1
Moors: 2 (my favourite being Stanton Moor -- my camera packed up but this photo is way better than any I took anyway)
Outdoor hot tubs: 1
Pubs: 5 (my favourite being the Black Swan in Crich: lovely pint, cheese and pickle toastie, mongrels welcome, lead piping in the toilets, what more could you want?)
Books: 1 (Money, by Martin Amis. Perfect for reading when either drunk or hungover.)
Derbyshire oatcakes: 3 (with fried egg and Encona: genius)
Celebs staying nearly-next-door: 1 (I think, I only went round to see if he knew how to work his oven, and I was a bit pissed)
Amount *per place setting* that the only cutlery I have ever loved (made in Derbyshire, tested on cake) costs: £75. I might have to get married after all.*
Old lead mines visited by boat: 1
Stately homes: 2 (my favourite stately thing being the gravity-fed Emperor Fountain at Chatsworth. Fucking amazing, frankly, given that the average British house can't manage a decent shower).

Moments of marvel at the joys to be had holidaying in England: many. Thanks Global Warming. Oh, and happy birthday M.

joella
*joke

Honey, I burnt the heuchera

(I'm blogging by firelight in the garden. I've just singed half the perennials)

Twenty years ago, I went out with a man called Colin. I was 17 and he was 22; I lived in Lancashire and he lived in the New Forest. It was an enormously unlikely and ultimately unsustainable arrangement, but for a good few months it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.

We didn't see each other very often, what with the 300 miles and my A-levels to contend with, but we wrote to each other in between what used to be called Nooky Runs.

There was so much I blatantly didn't know and couldn't pretend to, in those days, that when there was something I didn't know but felt that possibly I should know, I tended to keep quiet about it and try and work it out. I still do that sometimes. I'm still not sure what the Westland Affair was, for example, but I nod knowledgeably whenever it comes up.

Colin wrote me a letter which contained two song quotes. He didn't attribute either of them, presumably assuming I'd recognise them, and I was too proud to ask where they were from. I thought to myself, 'I'll hear those songs one day, and then I'll know'. There were no lyrics servers in 1987.

And I was right. The first one was
"I see you now and you are so very young, and I've seen battles lost, and I've seen battles won. And I've got this intuition that it's all for your fun."

This is from The Queen and the Soldier by Suzanne Vega, which I heard barely a couple of months later, when my friend N pressed a tape into my hands one Saturday and said 'you need to hear this album'. I already knew Marlene on the Wall, as I practically lost my virginity to it, and the rest of the album had me completely spellbound. The Queen and the Soldier is still one of my favourite songs in the world, though not specifically for that reason.

The second one took a couple of years, but come 1990 I was lying on a beanbag in the bedroom of my Significant Ex, a few spliffs worse for wear, listening to Pink Floyd's The Final Cut for the first time.

"I was just a child then," he sang (Roger Waters, not my Significant Ex). I sat bolt upright and said "Now I'm only a man". Then I said 'wow' a lot.

Patience is a virtue, I have always believed, even if I haven't always practised it. And if you've got this far through this post you clearly have it in spades, so I'll get to the point.

There's a book I've been waiting to find for years and years and years. I read it before I was 10 -- I think one of my primary school teachers lent it to me, I was a fairly precocious reader -- and little bits of it were seared into my mind, but I had no idea what it was called or who the author was. I remembered a lonely girl, Lilliput, bloaters and lots of weirdness. I had one phrase to go on, which was that she had 'eyes the colour of Marmite'.

I've been Googling that phrase since before there was Google, I remember searching Alta Vista for it, full of hopes (dashed), and Asking Jeeves (likewise). I've been waiting for the full text of all books ever to be there for the searching.

I'm still waiting. But I've kept trying (it's been my default search phrase in any new search engine, but it's never taken me anywhere).

Until today. Today I found the book. By pure chance my phrase is part of the first paragraph, and I found it quoted twice: once as part of a first sentence guessing competition, and once by a secondhand bookseller selling an early edition of it.

The book opens:

"Maria was ten years old. She had dark hair in two pigtails, and brown eyes the colour of marmite, but more shiny. She wore spectacles for the time being, though she would not have to wear them always, and her nature was a loving one. ...Unfortunately she was an orphan, which made her difficulties more complicated than they were with other people."

I always knew I'd find that book eventually. It's called Mistress Masham's Repose, and it's by T H White, who coincidentally (or is it?) wrote one of M's favourite childhood books, The Once and Future King. Tomorrow I'm off to get it out of the library.

The internet is a beautiful thing.

joella

Pipework and Potter

Nestling in my wallet is a cheque for £700 from J the plumber. It's my first proper plumbing money. I don't want to cash it, I want to frame it.

I am of course still running at a massive net loss, if you count the cost of the course, the cost of the tools, the money I haven't been earning at NGO X since I went part time at the end of last year, the massive mobile phone bills I have run up ("no, it's still leaking, what do I do now?"). And if you knew how many hours I worked to earn that £700 you might think I was bonkers. I know some people do. Hell, quite often *I* do. So I wouldn't blame you.

But I did it my way. So I look at that cheque, and I smile.

And the £700 doesn't cover whatever it is I may have earnt this week plumbing in a giant vegetable steamer in a pub kitchen in Abingdon (the job that was flooded out last week). I was doing the pipework, J was doing the drainage, and S was doing the electrics. We were working alongside the staff, who were preparing lunch. It could have been awful, but it wasn't: everyone working in the kitchen was Eastern European, and they were considerate to a fault. There was a moment when I was perched on top of a large, temporarily relocated fridge with an SDS drill -- the drill was vibrating, the fridge was shaking underneath me, sweat was dripping into my eyes and waitresses were squeezing past like nothing untoward was happening. One of the chefs did squeeze me on the leg at one point, but it was a fairly pointless exercise, as I had my kneepads on.

Later, I was curled up behind the fridge fitting the non-return valve and the appliance isolator, swearing gently and melting slowly (it's a long time since I worked in a pub kitchen... they are really fucking hot) when J appeared above me. Leave that, he said, it's lunchtime. And we sat outside for half an hour with a platter of sandwiches and our flasks of coffee. I love it when someone tells me to take lunch. I love going through doors marked Private. I love it when my pipework comes together. And I love knocking off at 3 because the job's done.

So there was plenty of time to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows . Unlike Beth, I was wrong about Snape (well, not wrong, but far from right). But I was right about Dumbledore, if not quite for the right reasons. I found its style as bloated and heavy-handed as most of its predecessors' -- especially the last chapter, which is almost unforgivably trite -- but it remains (sorry Charlie) a fantastic story on many levels and in many ways. Here's to the Free Elf (he was always my favourite).

joella

Multiple deprivation

I found out this week, via Meg, via Zoe Williams, via Loyd Grossman Sauces, that most British people a) have around four staple meals, the most popular being spaghetti bolognese, sausages and mash, chicken tikka masala and chilli con carne, and b) eat precious little else. I am not sure I trust the agenda of a readymade sauce manufacturer any more than I trust readymade sauces themselves, but even if it's only a bit true it's not a very cheery thought.

There are some staple meals chez joella, of course, and some of them - lentil soup, nut roast, celery-mushroom-pasta-bake, fishy-eggy-ricy-thing, tuna-noodle-pickled-vegetable - have been around for a decade or more. I also keep a jar of pesto in the fridge, which I eat with pasta and without shame.

But most of the time, we make it up, depending what we feel like, how much time we've got, who's in the mood to cook, what veg we have in, and what's in the fridge. Sometimes it's a disaster (I won't be doing those beetroot and sweet potato fritters again), but it's rarely out of a jar. And every time I buy a crap ready meal or eat rubbish takeaway food I curse a culture that can so shamelessly sell us something so utterly devoid of all the things food should have and so utterly full of all the things it shouldn't. Then I curse myself for being disorganised, lazy or drunk enough to be giving it stomach room. But now I think, how many people think this is normal?

I was in fact musing on this as I was bashing my leadwork around in plumbing class this week, when the subject of books came up. I have no idea how, given what followed, but it wasn't me who mentioned them first. The guy next to me said 'I never read books'. What are you talking about, I said. 'I reckon I've read two books in my life,' he said. I just looked at him. I think my mouth may have fallen open. Wow, I said. I think I'd die without books. I probably read about a book a week. I never stop reading. I have been known to read books by Andy McNab in the absence of anything else to read.

We looked at each other in mutual incomprehension for a few seconds, then got back to hitting things. But then I don't like football, so what do I know?

joella